Purple Snow: Where Prince Came From
Pitchfork reports: ‘Regional funk and R&B compilations have been flooding the reissue market for ages now, and yet in all that time, it’s taken until this year for even the deepest-digging reissue label in the business to get to the foundation of one of the most vital scenes in funk lore. The chart-topping, synth-heavy pulse that came out of the Twin Cities in the 80s still seems, even to most music fans short of the local veteran scenester, to be an abrupt fluke of auteurist proficiency and creativity, largely credited to the braintrusts of everything-man superstar Prince and the songwriting/production juggernaut of Jimmy Jam Harris and Terry Lewis. The groups these three names cut their chops with have been hinted at by music historians, and the peers they shared a scene with got some acknowledgment here and there. But little of this information has ever really been put into the wider context of what Minneapolis sounded like before the Minneapolis Sound. How could the scene that gave us 1999 and Control have such an underknown history where its pre-eighties R&B roots are concerned?’
